The Thirteenth Tale

AND SO WE BEGAN…

At nine o'clock the next morning Miss Winter sent for me and I went to her in the library.

By daylight the room was quite different. With the shutters folded back, the full-height windows let the light flood in from the pale sky. The garden, still wet from the night's downpour, gleamed in the morning sun. The exotic plants by the window seats seemed to touch leaf with their hardier, damper cousins beyond the glass, and the delicate framework that held the panes in place seemed no more solid than the glimmering threads of a spider's web stretched across a garden path from branch to branch. The library itself, slighter, narrower seemingly than the night before, appeared as a mirage of books in the wet winter garden.

In contrast to the palely blue sky and the milk-white sun, Miss Winter was all heat and fire, an exotic hothouse flower in a northern winter garden. She wore no sunglasses today, but her eyelids were colored purple, lined Cleopatra-style with kohl and fringed with the same heavy black lashes as yesterday. In the clear daylight I saw what I had not seen the night before: along the ruler-straight parting in Miss Winter's copper curls was a narrow margin of pure white.

"You remember our agreement," she began, as I sat down in the chair on the other side of the fire. "Beginnings, middles and endings, all in the correct order. No cheating. No looking ahead. No questions." I was tired. A strange bed in a strange place, and I had woken with a dull, atonic tune ringing in my head. "Start where you like," I said.

"I shall start at the beginning. Though of course the beginning is never where you think it is. Our lives are so important to us that we tend to think the story of them begins with our birth. First there was nothing, then / was born… Yet that is not so. Human lives are not pieces of string that can be separated out from a knot of others and laid out straight. Families are webs. Impossible to touch one part of it without setting the rest vibrating. Impossible to understand one part without having a sense of the whole.

"My story is not only mine; it is the story of Angelfield. Angelfield the village. Angelfield the house. And the Angelfield family itself. George and Mathilde; their children, Charlie and Isabelle; Isabelle's children, Emmeline and Adeline. Their house, their fortunes, their fears. And their ghost. One should always pay attention to ghosts, shouldn't one, Miss Lea?"

She gave me a sharp look; I pretended not to see it.

"A birth is not really a beginning. Our lives at the start are not really our own but only the continuation of someone else's story. Take me, for instance. To look at me now, you would think my birth must have been something special, wouldn't you? Accompanied by strange portents, and attended by witches and fairy godmothers. But no. Not a bit of it. In fact, when I was born I was no more than a subplot.

"But how do I know this story that precedes my birth, I hear you thinking. What are the sources? Where does the information come from? Well, where does any information come from in a house like Angelfield? The servants, of course. The Missus, in particular. Not that I learned it all directly from her lips. Sometimes, it is true, she would reminisce about the past while she sat cleaning the silverware, and seem to forget my presence as she spoke. She frowned as she remembered village rumors and local gossip. Events and conversations and scenes rose to her lips and played themselves out afresh over the kitchen table. But sooner or later the story would lead her into areas unsuitable for a child-unsuitable in particular for me-then suddenly she would remember I was there, break off her account mid-sentence and start rubbing the cutlery vigorously, as if to erase the past altogether. But there can be no secrets in a house where there are children. I pieced the story together another way. When the Missus talked with the gardener over their morning tea, I learned to interpret the sudden silences that punctuated seemingly innocent conversations. Without appearing to notice anything, I saw the silent glances that certain words provoked between them. And when they thought they were alone and could talk privately… they were not in fact alone. In this way I understood the story of my origins. And later, when the Missus was no longer the woman she used to be, when age confused her and released her tongue, then her meanderings confirmed the story I had spent years divining. It is this story-the one that came to me in hints, glances and silences-I am going to translate into words for you now."

Miss Winter cleared her throat, preparing to start.

"Isabelle Angelfield was odd."

Her voice seemed to slip away from her, and she stopped, surprised. When she spoke again, her tone was cautious. "Isabelle Angelfield was born during a rainstorm." It came again, the abrupt loss of voice. So used was she to hiding the truth that it had become atrophied in her. She made one false start, then another. But, like a gifted musician who, after years without playing, takes up her instrument again, she finally found her way.

She told me the story of Isabelle and Charlie.

Isabelle Angelfield was odd. Isabelle Angelfield was born during a rainstorm. It is impossible to know whether or not these facts are connected.

But when, two and a half decades later, Isabelle left home for the second time, people in the village looked back and remembered the endlessness of the rain on the day of her birth. Some remembered as if it was yesterday that the doctor was late, delayed by the floods caused by the river having burst its banks. Others recalled beyond the shadow of a doubt that the cord had been wrapped round the baby's neck, almost strangling her before she could be born. Yes, it was a difficult birth, all right, for on the stroke of six, just as the baby was born and the doctor rang the bell, hadn't the mother passed away, out of this world and into the next? So if the weather had been fine, and the doctor had been earlier, and if the cord had not deprived the child of oxygen, and if the mother had not died…

And if, and if, and if. Such thinking is pointless. Isabelle was as Isabelle was, and that is all there is to say about the matter.

The infant, a white scrap of fury, was motherless. And at the beginning, to all intents and purposes, it looked like she'd be fatherless, too. For her father, George Angelfield, fell into a decline. He locked himself in the library and refused point-blank to come out. This might seem excessive; ten years of marriage is usually enough to cure marital affection, but Angelfield was an odd fellow, and there it was. He had loved his wife-his ill-tempered, lazy, selfish and pretty Mathilde. He had loved her more than he loved his horses, more even than his dog. As for their son, Charlie, a boy of nine, it never entered George's head to wonder whether he loved him more or less than Mathilde, for the fact was, he never thought of Charlie at all.

Bereaved, driven half mad with grief, George Angelfield sat all day in the library, eating nothing, seeing no one. And he spent his nights there, too, on the daybed, not sleeping but staring red-eyed at the moon. This went on for months. His pale cheeks became paler; he grew thin; he stopped speaking. Specialists were called from London. The vicar came and left again. The dog pined away from want of affection, and when it died, George Angelfield barely noticed.

In the end the Missus got fed up with it all. She picked up baby Isabelle from the crib in the nursery and took her downstairs. She strode past the butler, ignoring his protestations, and went into the library without knocking. Up to the desk she marched, and she plumped the baby down in George Angelfield's arms without a word. Then she turned her back and walked out, slamming the door behind her.

The butler made to go in, thinking to retrieve the infant, but the Missus raised her finger and hissed, "Don't you dare!" He was so startled that he obeyed. The household servants gathered outside the library door, looking at one another, not knowing what to do. But the force of the Missus's conviction held them paralyzed, and they did nothing.

It was a long afternoon, and at the end of it one of the underhouse maids ran to the nursery. "He's come out! The master's come out!" At her normal pace and in her normal manner, the Missus came downstairs to hear what had happened.

The servants had stood about in the hall for hours, listening at the door and peeking through the keyhole. At first their master just sat there, looking at the baby, with a dull and perplexed expression on his face. The baby wriggled and gurgled. When George Angelfield was heard cooing and chuckling in response, the servants exchanged looks of astonishment, but they were more astonished later to hear lullabies. The baby slept and there was silence. Her father, the servants reported, did not once take his eyes from his daughter's face. Then she awoke, hungry, and set to crying. Her shrieks rose in intensity and pitch until finally the door was flung open.

There stood my grandfather with his baby in his arms. Seeing his servants standing idly about, he glared at them and his voice boomed out: "Is a baby left to starve in this house?"

From that day on George Angelfield took personal charge of his daughter. He fed her, bathed her and the rest, moved her cot into his room in case she cried of loneliness in the night, fashioned a papoose so that he could take her riding, read to her (business letters, the sports pages and romantic novels), and shared all his thoughts and plans with her. He behaved, in short, as though Isabelle was a sensible, pleasant companion and not a wild and ignorant child.

Perhaps it was her looks that made her father love her. Charlie, the neglected older child, nine years Isabelle 's senior, was his father's son:a lumpen, pasty, carrot-topped boy, with heavy feet and a slow expression. But Isabelle inherited her looks from both her parents. The ginger hair shared by her father and brother was burnished in the girl child to a rich, glossy auburn. In her, the pale Angelfield complexion was stretched over fine French bones. She had the better chin from the father's side, and the better mouth from the mother's. She had Mathilde 's slanting eyes and long lashes, but when they lifted, it was to reveal the astonishing emerald irises that were the emblem of the Angelfields. She was, physically at least, perfection itself.

The household adapted to the unusual state of affairs. They lived with the unspoken agreement to behave as though it were entirely normal for a father to dote on his baby daughter. It was not to be considered unmanly, ungentlemanly or ridiculous that he kept her constantly by him.

But what about Charlie, the baby's brother? He was a slow-witted boy whose mind turned in circles around his few obsessions and preoccupations, but who could not be prevailed upon to learn new ideas or think logically. He ignored the baby and welcomed the changes her arrival introduced to the household. Before Isabelle there had been two parents to whom the Missus might report instances of bad behavior, two parents whose reactions were impossible to foresee. His mother had been an inconsistent disciplinarian; sometimes having him spanked for bad behavior, at other times merely laughing. His father, although stern, was distracted, and the punishments he intended were frequently forgotten. Catching sight of the boy, though, he would have the vague sense that there might be some misdemeanor to correct, and he would spank the child, thinking that if it wasn't actually owed it would do in advance for next time. This taught the boy a good lesson: He stayed out of the way of his father.

With the coming of the baby Isabelle, all this changed. Mamma was gone, and Papa as good as, too busy with his little Isabelle to concern himself with hysterical reports from housemaids about mice roasted with the Sunday joint or pins pressed by malicious hands deep into the soap. Charlie was free to do as he pleased, and what pleased him was removing floorboards at the top of the attic stairs and watching the housemaids tumble down and sprain their ankles.

The Missus could scold, but then she was only the Missus, and in this new, free life he could maim and wound to his heart's content, in the certain knowledge that he would get away with it. Consistent adult behavior is said to be good for children, and consistent neglect certainly suited this child, for in these early years of his semi-orphanhood Charlie Angelfield was as happy as the day is long.

George Angelfield's adoration of his daughter persisted through all the trials a child can inflict on a parent. When she started to talk, he discovered her to be preternaturally gifted, a veritable oracle, and he began to consult her on everything, until the household came to be run according to the caprices of a three-year-old child.

Visitors were rare, and as the household descended from eccentricity into chaos, they became rarer. Then the servants began to complain among themselves. The butler had left before the child was two. Cook put up for a year longer with the irregular mealtimes that the child demanded, then the day came when she, too, handed in her notice. When she left she took the kitchen girl with her, and in the end it was left to the Missus to ensure the provision of cake and jelly at odd hours. The housemaids felt under no obligation to occupy themselves with chores: Not unreasonably they believed that their small salaries barely compensated them for the cuts and bruises, sprained ankles and stomach upsets they incurred owing to Charlie's sadistic experiments. They left and were replaced by a succession of temporary help, none of whom lasted long. Finally even the temporary help was dispensed with.

By the time Isabelle was five the household had shrunk to George Angelfield, the two children, the Missus, the gardener and the gamekeeper. The dog was dead, and the cats, fearful of Charlie, kept out doors, taking refuge in the garden shed when the weather turned cold. If George Angelfield noticed their isolation, their domestic squalor, he did not regret it. He had Isabelle; he was happy.

If anyone missed the servants it was Charlie. Without them he was lost for subjects for his experiments. When he was scouting around for someone to hurt, his eye fell, as it was bound sooner or later to do, on his sister.

He couldn't afford to make her cry in the presence of his father, and since she rarely left her father's side, Charlie was faced with a difficulty. How to get her away?

By enticement. Whispering promises of magic and surprise, Charlie led Isabelle out of the side door, along one end of the knot garden, between the long borders, out through the topiary garden and along the beech avenue to the woods. There was a place Charlie knew. An old hovel, dank and windowless, a good place for secrets.

What Charlie was after was a victim, and his sister, walking behind him, smaller, younger and weaker, must have seemed ideal. But she was odd and she was clever, and things did not turn out exactly as he expected.

Charlie pulled his sister's sleeve up and drew a piece of wire, orange with rust, along the white inside of her forearm. She stared at the red beads of blood that were welling up along the livid line, then turned her gaze upon him. Her green eyes were wide with surprise and something like pleasure. When she put out her hand for the wire he gave it to her automatically. She pulled up her other sleeve, punctured the skin and with application drew the wire down almost to her wrist. Her cut was deeper than the one he had given her, and the blood rose up at once and trickled. She gave a sigh of satisfaction as she looked at it and then licked the blood away. Then she offered the wire back to him and motioned to him to pull up his sleeve.

Charlie was bewildered. But he dug the wire into his arm because she wanted it, and he laughed through the pain. Instead of a victim Charlie had found himself the strangest of conspirators.

Life went on for the Angelfields, sans parties, sans hunt meetings, sans housemaids and sans most of the things that people of their class took for granted in those days. They turned their backs on their neighbors, allowed their estate to be managed by the tenants, and depended on the goodwill and honesty of the Missus and the gardener for those day-today transactions with the world that were necessary for survival.

George Angelfield forgot about the world, and for a time the world forgot about him. And then they remembered him. It was to do with money.

There were other large houses in the vicinity. Other more or less aristocratic families. Among them was a man who took great care of his money. He sought out the best advice, invested large sums where wisdom dictated and speculated small sums where the risk of loss was greater but the profit, in the case of success, high. The large sums he lost completely. The small ones went up-moderately. He found himself in a pickle. In addition he had a lazy, spendthrift son and a goggle-eyed, thick-ankled daughter. Something had to be done.

George Angelfield never saw anyone, hence he was never offered financial tips. When his lawyer sent him recommendations, he ignored them, and when his bank sent him letters, he did not write back. As a consequence of this, the Angelfield money, instead of expending itself chasing one deal after another, lounged in its bank vault and grew fat.

Money talks. Word got out. "Doesn't George Angelfield have a son?" asked the wife of the near-bankrupt. "How old would he be now? Twenty-six?"

And if not the son for their Sybilla, then why not the girl for Roland? thought the wife. She must be reaching a marriageable age by now. And the father was known to dote on her: She would not come empty-handed.

"Nice weather for a picnic," she said, and her husband, in the way of husbands, did not see the connection.

The invitation languished for a fortnight on the drawing room windowsill, and it might have remained there until the sun bleached the color out of the ink, had it not been for Isabelle. One afternoon, at a loss for something to do, she came down the stairs, puffed out her cheeks in boredom, picked the letter up and opened it.

"What's that?" said Charlie.

"Invitation," she said. "To a picnic."

A picnic? Charlie's mind turned it over. It seemed strange. But he shrugged and forgot it. Isabelle stood up and went to the door. "Where are you going?" "To my room." Charlie made to follow her, but she stopped him. "Leave me alone," she said. "I'm not in the mood."

He complained, took a handful of her hair and ran his fingers over the nape of her neck, finding the bruises he had made last time. But she twisted away from him, ran upstairs and locked the door.

An hour later, hearing her come down the stairs, he went to the doorway. "Come to the library with me," he asked her.

"No."

"Then come to the deer park."

"No."

He noticed that she had changed her clothes. "What do you look like that for?" he said. "You look stupid."

She was wearing a summer dress that had belonged to their mother, made of a flimsy white material and trimmed with green. Instead of her usual tennis shoes with their frayed laces, she had put on a pair of green satin sandals a size too big-also their mother's-and had attached a flower in her hair with a comb. She had lipstick on.

His heart darkened. "Where are you going?" he asked.

"To the picnic."

He grabbed her by the arm, dug his fingers in and pulled her toward the library.

"No!"

He pulled her harder.

She hissed at him, "Charlie, I said no!"

He let her go. When she said no like that, he knew it meant no. He had found that out in the past. She could be in a bad temper for days. She turned her back on him and opened the front door. Full of anger, Charlie looked for something to hit. But he had already broken everything that was breakable. The things that were left would do more harm to his knuckles than he could do to them. His fists slackened; he followed Isabelle out of the door and to the picnic.

The young people at the lakeside made a pretty picture from a distance, in their summer frocks and white shirts. The glasses they held were filled with a liquid that sparkled in the sunlight, and the grass at their feet looked soft enough to go barefoot. In reality, the picnickers were sweltering beneath their clothes, the champagne was warm, and if anyone had thought to take their shoes off they would have had to walk through goose droppings. Still, they were willing to feign jollity, in the hope that their pretense would encourage the real thing.

A young man at the edge of the crowd caught sight of movement up near the house. A girl in a strange outfit accompanied by a lump of a man. There was something about her.

He failed to respond to his companion's joke; the companion looked to see what had caught his attention and fell silent in turn. A group of young women, eternally alert to the doings of young men even when the young men are behind their backs, turned to see what had caused the sudden silence. And there followed a sort of ripple effect, whereby the entire party turned to face the newcomers, and seeing them, were struck dumb.

Across the wide lawn walked Isabelle.

She neared the group. It parted for her as the sea parted for Moses, and she walked straight through it to the lake edge. She stood on a flat rock that jutted out over the water. Someone came toward her with a glass and a bottle, but she waved them away. The sun was bright, it had been a long walk and it would take more than champagne to cool her down.

She took off her shoes, hung them in a tree and, arms outstretched, let herself fall into the water.

The crowd gasped, and when she rose to the surface, water streaming from her form in ways that recalled the birth of Venus, they gasped again.

This plunge into the water was another thing people remembered years later, after she left home for the second time. They remembered, and shook their heads in a mix of pity and condemnation. The girl had had it in her all that time. But on the day it was put down to sheer high spirits, and people were grateful to her. Single-handedly Isabelle brought the whole party to life.

One of the young men, the boldest, with fair hair and a loud laugh, kicked off his shoes, removed his tie and leapt into the lake with her. A trio of his friends followed. In no time at all, the young men were all in the water, diving, calling, shouting and outdoing one another in athleticism and splash.

Thinking quickly, the girls saw there was only one way to go. They hung their sandals in the branches, put on their most excited faces and splashed into the water, uttering cries that they hoped would sound abandoned, while doing their utmost to prevent any excessive dampening of their hair.

Their efforts were in vain. The men had eyes only for Isabelle.

Charlie did not follow his sister into the water. He stood, a little farther off, and watched. With his red hair and his pallor, he was a man made for rain and indoor pursuits. His face had gone pink in the sun, and his eyes stung as the sweat from his brow ran into them. But he hardly blinked. He could not bear to take his eyes off Isabelle.

How many hours later was it that he found himself with her again? It seemed an eternity. Enlivened by Isabelle 's presence the picnic went on much longer than anybody had expected, and yet it seemed to the other guests to have passed in a flash, and they would all have stayed longer if they could. The party broke up with consoling thoughts of other picnics to come, a round of promised invitations and damp kisses.

When Charlie approached her, Isabelle had a young man's jacket arranged around her shoulders and the young man himself in the palm of her hand. Not far off a girl loitered, uncertain whether her presence was wanted. Though she was plump, plain and female, the resemblance she nonetheless bore to the young man made it clear she was his sister.

"Come on," Charlie said roughly to his sister.

"So soon? I thought we might go for a walk. With Roland and Sybilla." She smiled graciously at Roland's sister, and Sybilla, surprised at the unexpected kindness, beamed back.

Charlie could get his own way with Isabelle at home-sometimes- by hurting her, but in public he didn't dare, and so he buckled under.

What happened during that walk? There were no witnesses to the events that took place in the forest. For want of witnesses there was no gossip. At least not at first. But one does not have to be a genius to deduce from later events what took place under the canopy of summer foliage that evening.

It would have been something like this:

Isabelle would have found some pretext for sending the men away.

"My shoes! I left them in the tree!" And she'd have sent Roland to fetch them, and Charlie, too, for a shawl of Sybilla's or some other item.

The girls settled themselves on a patch of soft ground. In the men's absence they waited in the growing darkness, drowsy from champagne, breathing in the remains of the sun's heat and with it the beginning of something darker, the forest and the night. The warmth of their bodies began to drive the moisture from their dresses, and as the folds of fabric dried, they detached themselves from the flesh beneath and tickled.

Isabelle knew what she wanted. Time alone with Roland. But to get it, she had to be rid of her brother. She began to talk while they lolled back against a tree. "So which is your beau, then?"

"I don't really have a beau," Sybilla admitted.

"But you should." Isabelle rolled on her side, took the feathery leaf of a fern and let it run over her lips. Then she let it run over the lips of her companion.

"That tickles," Sybilla murmured.

Isabelle did it again. Sybilla smiled, eyes half shut, and did not stop her when Isabelle ran the soft leaf down her neck and around the neckline of her dress, paying special attention to the swell of the breasts. Sybilla emitted a semi-nasal giggle.

When the leaf ran down to her waist and beyond, Sybilla opened her eyes.

"You've stopped," she complained.

"I haven't," said Isabelle. "It's just that you can't feel it through your dress." And she pulled up the hem of Sybilla's dress and played the fronds along her ankles. "Better?"

Sybilla reclosed her eyes.

From the somewhat thick ankle the green plume found its way to a distinctly chunky knee. An adenoidal murmur escaped from between Sybilla's lips, though she did not stir until the fronds came to the very top of her legs, and she did not sigh until Isabelle replaced the greenery with her own tender fingers.

Isabelle 's sharp eyes did not once leave the face of the older girl, and the moment the girl's eyelids gave the first hint of a flicker, she drew her hand away.

"Of course," she said, very matter-of-fact, "it's a beau you need really."

Sybilla, roused unwillingly from her incomplete rapture, was slow to catch on. "For the tickling," Isabelle had to explain. "It's much better with a beau."

And when Sybilla asked her newfound friend, "How do you know?" Isabelle had the answer all ready: "Charlie." By the time the boys returned, shoes and shawl in hand, Isabelle had achieved her purpose. Sybilla, a certain dishevelment apparent in her skirt and petticoat, regarded Charlie with an expression of warm interest.

Charlie, indifferent to the scrutiny, was looking at Isabelle.

"Have you thought how similar Isabelle and Sybilla are?" Isabelle said carelessly. Charlie glared. "The sounds of the names, I mean. Almost interchangeable, wouldn't you say?" She sent a sharp glance at her brother, forcing him to understand. "Roland and I are going to walk a bit farther. But Sybilla's tired. You stay with her." Isabelle took Roland's arm.

Charlie looked coldly at Sybilla, registered the disarrangement of her dress. She stared back at him, eyes wide, mouth slightly open.

When he turned back to where Isabelle had been, she was already gone. Only her laughter came back to him from the darkness, her laughter and the low rumble of Roland's voice. He would get his own back later. He would. Time and time again she would pay for this.

In the meantime he had to vent his feelings somehow.

He turned to Sybilla.

The summer was full of picnics. And for Charlie, it was full of Sybillas. But for Isabelle there was only one Roland. Every day she slipped out of Charlie's sight, escaped his grasp and disappeared on her bicycle. Charlie could never find out where the pair met, was too slow to follow her as she took flight, the bicycle wheels spinning beneath her, hair flying behind. Sometimes she would not return until darkness had fallen, sometimes not even then. When he scolded her, she laughed at him and turned her back as though he simply wasn't there. He tried to hurt her, to maim her, but as she eluded him time after time, slipping through his fingers like water, he realized how much their games had been dependent on her willingness. However great his strength, her quickness and cleverness meant she got away from him every time. Like a boar enraged by a bee, he was powerless.

Once in a while, placatory, she gave in to his entreaties. For an hour or two she lent herself to his will, allowing him to enjoy the illusion that she was back for good and that everything between them was as it always had been. But it was an illusion, as Charlie soon learned, and her renewed absence after these interludes was all the more agonizing.

Charlie forgot his pain only momentarily with the Sybillas. For a time his sister prepared the way for him, then as she became more and more delighted with Roland, Charlie was left to make his own arrangements. He lacked his sister's subtlety; there was an incident that could have been a scandal, and a vexed Isabelle told him that if that was how he intended to go about things then he would have to choose a different sort of woman. He turned from the daughters of minor aristocrats to those of farriers, farmers and foresters. Personally he couldn't tell the difference, yet the world seemed to mind less.

Frequent though they were, these instances of forgetfulness were fleeting. The shocked eyes, the bruised arms, the bloodied thighs were erased from memory the moment he turned away from them. Nothing could touch the great passion in his life: his feelings for Isabelle.

One morning toward the end of the summer, Isabelle turned the blank pages in her diary and counted the days. She closed the book and replaced it in the drawer thoughtfully. When she had decided, she went downstairs to her father's study.

Her father looked up. "Isabelle!" He was pleased to see her.Since she had taken to going out more he was especially gratified when she came to seek him out like this.

"Darling Pa!" She smiled at him.

He caught a glint of something in her eye. "Is there something afoot?"

Her eyes traveled to a corner of the ceiling and she smiled. Without shifting her gaze from the dark corner, she told him she was leaving.

At first he hardly understood what she had said. He felt a pulse beat in his ears. His vision blurred. He closed his eyes, but inside his head there were volcanoes, meteorite strikes and explosions. When the flames died down and there was nothing left in his inner world but a silent, devastated landscape, he opened his eyes.

What had he done?

In his hand was a lock of hair, with a bloodied clod of skin attached at one end. Isabelle was there, her back to the door, her hands behind her. One beautiful green eye was bloodshot; one cheek looked red and slightly swollen. A trickle of blood crept from her scalp, reached her eyebrow and was diverted away from her eye.

He was aghast at himself and at her. He turned away from her in silence and she left the room.

Afterward he sat for hours, twisting the auburn hair that he had found in his hand, twisting and twisting, tighter and tighter around his finger, until it dug deep into his skin, until it was so matted that it could not be unwound. And finally, when the sensation of pain had at last completed its slow journey from his finger to his consciousness, he cried.

Charlie was absent that day and did not return home until midnight. Finding Isabelle's room empty he wandered through the house, knowing by some sixth sense that disaster had struck. Not finding his sister, he went to his father's study. One look at the gray-faced man told him everything. Father and son regarded each other for a moment, but the fact that their loss was shared did not unite them. There was nothing they could do for each other.

In his room Charlie sat on the chair next to the window, sat there for hours, a silhouette against a rectangle of moonlight. At some point he opened a drawer and removed the gun he had obtained by extortion from a local poacher, and two or three times he raised it to his temple. Each time the force of gravity soon returned it to his lap.

At four o'clock in the morning he put the gun away, and took up instead the long needle that he had pilfered from the Missus's sewing box a decade before and which had since seen much use. He pulled up his trouser leg, pushed his sock down and made a new puncture mark in his skin. His shoulders shook, but his hand was steady as on his shinbone he scored a single word: Isabelle.

Isabelle by this time was long gone. She had returned to her room for a few minutes and then left it again, taking the back stairs to the kitchen. Here she had given the Missus a strange, hard hug, which was quite unlike her, and then she slipped out of the side door and darted through the kitchen garden toward the garden door, set in a stone wall. The Missus's sight had been fading for a very long time, but she had developed the ability to judge people's movements by sensing vibrations in the air, and she had the impression that Isabelle hesitated, for the briefest of moments, before she closed the garden door behind her.

When it became apparent to George Angelfield that Isabelle was gone, he went into his library and locked the door. He refused food, he refused visitors. There were only the vicar and the doctor to come calling now, and both of them got short shrift. "Tell your God he can go to hell!" and "Let a wounded animal die in peace, won't you!" was the limit of their welcome.

A few days later they returned and called the gardener to break the door down. George Angelfield was dead. A brief examination was enough to establish that the man had died from septicemia, caused by the circle of human hair that was deeply embedded in the flesh of his ring finger.

Charlie did not die, though he didn't understand why not. He wandered about the house. He made a trail of footprints in the dust and followed it every day, starting at the top of the house and working down. Attic bedrooms not used for years, servants' rooms, family rooms, the study, the library, the music room, the drawing room, the kitchens. It was a restless, endless, hopeless search. At night he went out to roam the estate, his legs carrying him tirelessly forward, forward, forward. All the while he fingered the Missus's needle in his pocket. His fingertips were a bloody, scabby mess. He missed Isabelle.

Charlie lived like this through September, October, November, December, January and February, and at the beginning of March, Isabelle returned.

Charlie was in the kitchen, tracing his footsteps, when he heard the sound of hooves and wheels approaching the house. Scowling, he went to the window. He wanted no visitors. A familiar figure stepped down from the car-and his heart stood still. He was at the door, on the steps, beside the car all in one moment, and Isabelle was there.

He stared at her.

Isabelle laughed. "Here," she said, "take this." And she handed him a heavy parcel wrapped up in cloth. She reached into the back of the carriage and took something out. "And this one." He tucked it obediently under his arm. "Now, what I'd like most in the world is a very large brandy."

Stunned, Charlie followed Isabelle into the house and to the study. She made straight for the drinks cupboard and took out glasses and a bottle. She poured a generous slug into a glass and drank it in one go, showing the whiteness of her throat, then she refilled her own glass and the second, which she held out to her brother. He stood there, paralyzed and speechless, his hands full with the tightly wrapped bundles. Isabelle's laughter resounded about his ears again and it was like being too close to an enormous church bell. His head started to spin and tears sprang to his eyes. "Put them down," Isabelle instructed. "We'll drink a toast." He took the glass and inhaled the spirit fumes. "To the future!" He swallowed the brandy in one gulp and coughed at its unfamiliar burn.

"You haven't even seen them, have you?" she asked.

He frowned.

"Look." Isabelle turned to the parcels he had placed on the study desk, pulled the soft wrapping away, and stood back so that he could see. Slowly he turned his head and looked. The parcels were babies. Two babies. Twins. He blinked. Registered dimly that some kind of response was called for, but didn't know what he was supposed to say or do.

"Oh, Charlie, wake up, for goodness' sake!" and his sister took both his hands in hers and dragged him into a madcap dance around the room. She swirled him around and around and around, until the dizziness started to clear his head, and when they came to a halt she took his face in her hands and spoke to him. "Roland's dead, Charlie. It's you and me now. Do you understand?"

He nodded.

"Good. Now, where's Pa?"

When he told her, she was quite hysterical. The Missus, roused from the kitchen by the shrill cries, put her to bed in her old room, and when at last she was quiet again, asked, "These babies… what are they called?"

"March," Isabelle responded.

But the Missus knew that. Word of the marriage had reached her some months before, and news of the birth (she'd not needed to count the months on her fingers, but she did it anyway and pursed her lips). She knew of Roland's death from pneumonia a few weeks ago; knew too how old Mr. and Mrs. March, devastated by the death of their only son and repelled by the fey insouciance of their new daughter-in-law, now quietly shunned Isabelle and her children, wishing only to grieve.

"What about Christian names?"

"Adeline and Emmeline," said Isabelle sleepily.

"And how do you tell them apart?"

But the child-widow was sleeping already. And as she dreamed in her old bed, her escapade and her husband already forgotten, her virgin's name was restored to her. When she woke in the morning it would be as if her marriage had never been, and the babies themselves would appear to her not as her own children-she had not a single maternal bone in her body-but as mere spirits of the house.

The babies slept, too. In the kitchen, the Missus and the gardener bent over their smooth, pale faces and talked in low voices.

"Which one is which?" he asked.

"I don't know."

One each side of the old crib, they watched. Two half-moon sets of lashes, two puckered mouths, two downy scalps. Then one of the babies gave a little flutter of the eyelids and half opened one eye. The gardener and the Missus held their breath. But the eye closed again and the baby lapsed into sleep.

"That one can be Adeline," the Missus whispered. She took a striped tea towel from a drawer and cut strips from it. She plaited the strips into two lengths, tied the red one around the wrist of the baby who had stirred, the white one around the wrist of the baby who had not.

Housekeeper and gardener, each with a hand on the crib, watched, until the Missus turned a glad and tender face to the gardener and spoke again.

"Two babies. Honestly, Dig. At our age!" When he raised his eyes from the babies, he saw the tears that misted her round brown eyes.

His rough hand reached out across the crib. She wiped her foolishness away and, smiling, put her small, plump hand in his. He felt the wetness of her tears pressed against his own fingers.

Beneath the arch of their clasped hands, beneath the trembling line of their gaze, the babies were dreaming.

It was late when I finished transcribing the story of Isabelle and Charlie. The sky was dark and the house was asleep. All of the afternoon and evening and for part of the night I had been bent over my desk, with the story retelling itself in my ears while my pencil scratched line after line, obeying its dictation. My pages were densely packed with script: Miss Winter's own flood of words. From time to time my hand moved to the left and I scribbled a note in the left-hand margin, when her tone of voice or a gesture seemed to be part of the narrative itself.

Now I pushed the last sheet of paper from me, set down my pencil and clenched and stretched my aching fingers. For hours Miss Winter's voice had conjured another world, raising the dead for me, and I had seen nothing but the puppet show her words had made. But when her voice fell still in my head, her image remained and I remembered the gray cat that had appeared, as if by magic, on her lap. Silently he had sat under her stroking hand, regarding me fixedly with his round yellow eyes. If he saw my ghosts, if he saw my secrets, he did not seem the least perturbed, but only blinked and continued to stare indifferently.

"What's his name?" I had asked.

"Shadow," she absently replied.

At last in bed, I turned out the light and closed my eyes. I could still feel the place on the pad of my finger where the pencil had made a groove in my skin. In my right shoulder, a knot from writing was not yet ready to untie itself. Though it was dark, and though my eyes were closed, all I could see was a sheet of paper, lines of my own handwriting with wide margins. The right-hand margin drew my attention. Unmarked, pristine, it glowed white, made my eyes sting. It was the column I reserved for my own comments, notes and questions.

In the dark, my fingers closed around a ghost pencil and twitched in response to the questions that penetrated my drowsiness. I wondered about the secret tattoo Charlie bore inside his body, his sister's name etched onto his bone. How long would the inscription have remained? Could a living bone mend itself? Or was it with him till he died? In his coffin, underground, as his flesh rotted away from the bone, was the name Isabelle revealed to the darkness? Roland March, the dead husband, so soon forgotten… Isabelle and Charlie. Charlie and Isabelle. Who was the twins' father? And behind my thoughts, the scar on Miss Winter's palm rose into view. The letter Q for question, seared into human flesh.

As I started to sleepwrite my questions, the margin seemed to expand. The paper throbbed with light. Swelling, it engulfed me, until I realized with a mixture of trepidation and wonderment that I was enclosed in the grain of the paper, embedded in the white interior of the story itself. Weightless, I wandered all night long in Miss Winter's story, plotting its landscape, measuring its contours and, on tiptoe at its borders, peering at the mysteries beyond its bounds.